The FCO mandarins fear a Tory victory: good!

If you still need a reason to vote Conservative, read this. FCO mandarins are in a panic. They are terrified that a Tory Government might implement the wishes of the British people rather than deferring to the "experts". The Conservatives might even allow people a referendum. Good Heavens, Sir Humphrey! Where will it end? What if the voters don't want closer integration with Brussels? Where will that leave the Foreign Office?

Pace any diplomats reading this, it's nothing personal, my mother was one of you. It's just that you chaps have a tendency to pursue your own agenda, not ours. In his book This Blessed Plot, the Europhile journalist Hugo Young tracked down several of the diplomatists who had presided over Britain's Euro-accession in the 1960s and 1970s. They cheerfully admitted that they had, on occasion, disregarded the stated will of their elected ministers in order to pursue what they regarded as Britain's national interest. No doubt they did so from patriotic motives. But, looking at where we are today – our intercontinental trade damaged, our Commonwealth links prejudiced, our agriculture dying, our oceans sterile, our democracy vitiated and our Treasury several hundred billion pounds the poorer – it seems clear that they were wrong.

Here are two practical suggestions to draw diplomacy back into the orbital pull of public opinion. First, appoint ambassadors through open parliamentary hearings. It would, if nothing else, serve to remind them of whom they work for. (When George Schultz was US Secretary of State, he had a little ritual for appointing ambassadors. He'd show them a map of the world and ask them to point to their country. They would duly indicate Laos or wherever, and he would then tap the US and say: "Nope: this is your country.") Second, require all foreign treaties to be re-ratified by Parliament on an annual basis, or be deemed to have lapsed.

What's that? You think that diplomacy is too subtle and sophist for the lumpen masses? Well, perhaps that's been our problem. Perhaps a little simplicity is what we need. After all, some of our greatest international achievements came about as a result of public agitation. It was pressure from beneath that led to the abolotion of the slave trade. It was popular opinion, in the form of the Midlothian campaign, that led to Gladstone's moral foreign policy. It was a public campaign that replaced Chamberlain with Churchill. Compare this to what the experts have come up with over the years: backing Idi Amin well into the 1970s and Robert Mugabe well into the 1990s, sucking up to Nicolae Ceausecsu, encouraging Buenos Aires to think that we had no interest in maintaining sovereignty over the Falkland Islands. As in domestic affairs, so in foreign: give me the oxen over the grasshoppers any day.

Incidentally, the Independent was running the same canard about the Conservatives sitting with extremists ten years ago. Then, it argued that leaving the EPP would mean joining up with what it called "Italian neo-fascists", by which it meant Gianfranco Fini's Alleanza Nazionale. It has since been announced that these "Italian neo-fascists" will join the EPP next month. Alright, I know better than to expect the Indie to apologise. But it really is a bit much, in the circs, that the paper should now print a version of the same smear.